Invasive Species Management Through Tariffs: Are Prevention and Protection Synonymous?

This Paper designs a political economy model of invasive species management in order to explore the effectiveness of tariffs in mitigating the risk of invasion. The revenue interests of the government together with the interests of the lobby group competing with the imported agricultural commodity, that is believed to be the vector of invasive species, are incorporated in a Nash Bargaining game. The government, however, also considers the impact of tariffs on long run risks of invasion and decides optimal tariffs based upon its welfare in the pre and post-invasion scenarios. Along with the size of the lobby group, which is a function of the slope of the demand and supply curves, the weights assigned to the various components in the government welfare function too play a key role in influencing the extent to which tariffs could be an effective policy tool for invasive species management.